Let the debt ceiling games begin!

2015 could wind up being the best economic year for the developed world in nearly a decade.

In the U.S., hiring over the past year has been stronger than any time since the go-go 1990s. GDP growth in 2014 was the best the economy experienced since 2010. Even growth prospects in Europe are looking up in the wake of the European Central Bank’s launch of a quantitative easing plan. The ECB actually revised its growth prospects upward for once, estimating that the eurozone will grow by 1.5% this year rather than 1%.

The biggest potential risk to what looks like an accelerating recovery, however, is government. And with the government reaching an $18.1 trillion debt ceiling on Monday, Congress and the White House have a perfect opportunity to torpedo the economy. After that, the Treasury will need to resort to “extraordinary measures,” or accounting tricks to keep government debt under the statutory limit.

Chris Krueger, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, estimates that these measures will run out sometime around October 1, which gives the Republican-controlled Congress and President Obama about six months to come to an agreement on raising the debt ceiling.

The stakes are not small. The last government shutdown—when, in 2013, Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to defund Obamacare—lasted just 16 days, but it was severely damaging to the economy. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that the shutdown shaved off 0.3 percentage points from economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2013. If one assumes that GDP growth and job growth go hand in hand, that means that the shutdown led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. A longer shutdown could be even more damaging, especially if it lasts long enough to call into question the Treasury’s ability to make interest payments to its creditors.

In an analysis issued to clients on Friday, Krueger listed six possible scenarios for Washington to reach a resolution to the impending debt-ceiling showdown:

The Republicans “cave to Obama” and raise the debt ceiling cleanly.

The GOP and the President meet in the middle on a “process-driven compromise,” meaning that they would raise the debt ceiling under the condition that there is a process set up to reduce long-term deficits. Remember the so-called “Super Committee” that the President and Congress set up back in 2011 in an effort to reach a grand bargain on long-term debt.

The president “caves” to the GOP. This scenario might be similar to 2011, when President Obama agreed to deep budget cuts known as “the sequester” in return for Congress’ vote to raise the debt ceiling.

The minting of the “platinum coin.” The Treasury is allowed to mint coins worth any amount it wishes. It could simply deposit those funds at the Federal Reserve in exchange for dollars with which it could pay U.S. government obligations.

Do nothing, or what Krueger calls the “Thelma and Louise” scenario. If Congress and the President don’t reach an agreement, the government will shut down. The U.S. could default on its debt, if it gets to the point where the U.S. stops paying interest on its debt.

Krueger, for one, believes the first scenario is most likely. The conventional wisdom is that the Republican Party suffered politically from the last shutdown, and the recent battle over Homeland Security funding ended with the GOP giving in. But things could change—six months is an eternity in politics—and the GOP might be emboldened by their electoral gains in 2014 to play hardball over the debt ceiling.

Now that Republicans control the Senate, the GOP’s hand might be stronger this time around. For instance, Congress could send a debt-prioritization bill to the President, which would ensure that U.S. debt-holders would get their interest payments no matter what. This would allow the GOP to avoid blame for a default and reduce the risk of a government shutdown.

The Treasury Department, on the other hand, argues that debt prioritization isn’t possible given the way its computer systems are designed to pay the government’s bills. As Krueger writes, “Prioritization is a very grey area.” Even if the government is able to ensure that the U.S. doesn’t technically default, the situation would “get very ugly very fast,” he says. After all, prioritization would require the government to not pay a large portion of its bills, from social security checks, medicare payments, troop salaries, or any of the many other services the Feds provide. This would deal a major blow to individual Americans and the U.S. economy.

The threat of a shutdown is one of the biggest risks facing the global economy in 2015. Let’s hope the President and Congress can learn to play nice.

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

By Dan Kedmey, TIME

Drone manufacturer DJI will disable all of its devices within a 15.5-mile radius of downtown Washington D.C., following the crash landing of one of its drones in the White House compound on Monday.

The company said it would release what it called a mandatory update for its drone operating system in the coming days. The update would automatically disable drone flights over Washington D.C. and fence off no-fly zones around more than 10,000 airports across the country. However, owners of most DJI drones won’t be forced to download the update — those who choose not to install it would just miss out on new features down the road.

“We are pushing this out a bit earlier to lead in encouraging responsible flight,” said DJI spokesperson Michael Perry. “With the unmanned aerial systems community growing on a daily basis, we feel it is important to provide pilots additional tools to help them fly safely and responsibly.”

A Secret Service officer “heard and observed” a drone believed to be a DJI Phantom flying at a low altitude early Monday morning, before it crashed on the southeast side of the White House. The pilot, a government employee, had reportedly been drinking.

Mitch McConnell’s Secret Weapon: His Wife

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com

By Jay Newton-Small, TIME

The weekend before the midterm election, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, campaigned at a restaurant in Montgomery County, east of Lexington. Chao introduced McConnell to the packed house, but after the event was done McConnell sat down to grab a late lunch with a staffer. A woman and her two daughters approached the leader and asked for a photograph. His aide said, “Sure thing, can you just wait until the leader is finished eating?”

“Sure,” replied the women, who then continued to stand, staring at the leader as he ate.

Chao then sat down and she motioned for the woman and her daughters to join her at the other end of the table. And for 10 minutes, Chao engaged the family. “Are you two sisters?” she asked. They shyly nodded.

“I grew up with a lot of sisters, too. There’s nothing better than girl power,” she said, regaling the girls with stories of her five younger sisters and her family, who arrived in the U.S. from Taiwan on a freight ship in 1961, when Chao was eight, fleeing the communist revolution on mainland China. By the end of her stories, the girls were beaming and giggling.

McConnell, 72, was never one for retail campaigning. Childhood polio left him tender and averse to backslapping. To avoid it on the campaign trail, he’ll often grip a person with his left hand on the upper arm, holding them away from him, as he shakes their hand with his right. He’s also hard of hearing, which means in loud rooms he often misses what people say. But on the campaign trail, Chao, 61, makes up for her husband’s shortcomings.

Over the past two years, Chao headlined fifty of her own events and attended hundreds more with and on behalf of McConnell. She also raised “a huge part” of McConnell’s $30 million war chest, says John Ashbrook a spokesman for McConnell. But, perhaps most importantly, she was the campaign hugger.

Dr. Noelle Hunter said she’s formed a “special bond” with Chao over the past year, after McConnell worked to recover Hunter’s eight-year-old daughter, Luna, from Mali, when she was taken there by Hunter’s ex-husband. The political science professor, who was the subject of one of McConnell’s most memorable campaign commercials, was a former Democrat until she met the McConnells at a parade in Paintsville last year in August. “I went to shake her hand and she just grabbed me and held me gave me a mom-type hug,” Hunter said. “She said, ‘We are praying for you to get Luna home.’ She was so warm and gentle. I’d never met her before. I had no idea she even knew about my situation. And it meant the world to me that clearly these two people were talking about Luna over the dinner table.”

Chao is also the one who keeps tabs on various political allies across Kentucky. “She very actively listens. She really pays attention and remembers details about people,” says Kelly Westwood, head of the Kenton County women’s Republican group. “She doesn’t see them for months and then says, ‘I know you sprained your arm, how’s it going?’ Or, ‘How’s you bid for city council going?’ She remembers everything.”

It is perhaps Chao’s personal touch that helped McConnell offset his opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes’ attacks on him as anti-women. Chao starred in several ads on McConnell’s behalf talking about his record on women’s issues. In the end, McConnell beat Grimes 56% to 41%. “The biggest asset I have by far is the only Kentucky woman who served in a president’s cabinet, my wife, Elaine Chao,” McConnell said at the annual Fancy Farm GOP political picnic in August.

Soon after that event, Kathy Groob, the founder of a Democratic PAC, Elect Women, mocked Chao’s heritage on Twitter. “She’s not from KY… She is Asian and [President George W.] Bush openly touted that,” Groob said. Groob also referred to Chao as McConnell’s “Chinese wife,” and said McConnell is “wedded to free trade in China.”

Perhaps the only thing that really angers McConnell is when Chao is attacked. This has happened before, in 1996, when surrogates for his opponent that year (Democrat Steve Beshear, who is now governor of Kentucky) started saying, “It’s time to elect an All-American family to represent Kentucky.”

“It was a racial slur in my view and it infuriated the Senator,” says Billy Piper, a longtime former McConnell aide, who remains close with the leader. “He is not ever going to take it when she gets attacked.”

Chao is proud of her family’s history. Not only did they struggle against communism in a very personal way, but her father came to the U.S. with nothing and built a multi-million dollar shipping business.

And that legacy of hard work rubbed off on Chao, who wanted to give back to the country that gave her family so much. She graduated from Mount Holyoke and Harvard Business School before becoming a White House fellow in the Reagan Administration. She served as deputy Transportation Secretary under George H. W. Bush and director of the Peace Corps. In the Clinton era, Chao was named the head of the United Way before becoming Secretary of Labor for all eight years under George W. Bush.

McConnell, who married Chao in 1993, often quips: “People remark that I’m in a mixed marriage. I don’t see it that way. In my first marriage, I married a Liberal. Now that was a mixed marriage. With Elaine, she and I understand one another.”

The 2014 Midterms: A race that nobody won

Pundits called this midterm the Seinfeld election because, like the NBC sitcom, all its sound and fury signified not much. Voters agreed. They largely tuned out, concluding that those seeking office didn’t reflect their worries about the strength of the economic recovery. Politicians typically try to squeeze some wisdom about the popular will from the ballot results. But a confused campaign yields a muddled mandate. So don’t expect a consensus over a growth agenda to emerge from this mess.

We should probably state now that this issue of Fortune went to press before Election Day. There will be no shortage of ruminating about What It All Means once the verdict is in, but the depressing truth is that much of that is already knowable. Republicans notched their gains in both chambers of Congress by running against President Obama, not by pressing an affirmative vision of what they’d do as a party if handed the controls. “It’s only half the equation,” Republican pollster David Winston says, “and my viewpoint is that’s not enough.”

But even if candidates had rallied around specific plans for cutting through the morass—and from the business world’s perspective, there’s plenty that needs attention, from overhauls of our tax and immigration codes to new infrastructure spending—reality is primed to reassert itself in a hurry. Consider the tyranny of the congressional schedule, and it’s easy to see how only must-do items will move.

First comes the imperative to fundraise. On the heels of a record-breaking $4 billion election, the 23 Republican senators defending their seats in 2016 are rattling their tin cups already. For lawmakers it’s simple arithmetic: Three events a day netting a respectable $20,000 each, five days a week, amounts to $300,000 a week, or $15.6 million a year—seemingly a lot, but this year’s Senate races in Kentucky and North Carolina cost roughly $100 million each. “The fundraising treadmill never stops,” Republican lobbyist Rick Hohlt says.

The hustle for campaign cash erodes a schedule already shaved into three-day workweeks by lawmakers fleeing home to dodge the Washington stain. While Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, has pledged he’d keep the chamber humming during business days, the power of congressional chiefs to hold their members in town is limited. And they have a pile of deadline-driven work to cram into that shrinking window before they can contemplate any major reforms. Funding to keep the government open expires in December; borrowing authority to service our debt stops in March; a patch for Medicare payments to doctors comes due in April; and money for highway projects runs out in May. Since most bills will still need to clear the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle, “it’s very hard to see any big-ticket items passing next year,” one senior Democratic Senate aide says.

So as an election about nothing sets the stage for a similarly modest Congress, it may be smart to amend our expectations. “The best we could hope for would be no harm,” says Alan Krueger, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “That’s a reasonable outcome.”

Washington’s recreational pot sales reach a new high

Two months after the first recreational marijuana shops opened their doors in Washington, sales are flying high and providing a growing stream of tax revenue for the state.

Customers have bought $12.1 million of legal recreational pot since July 8, the day licensed stores first opened for business, according to Washington’s State Liquor Control Board. Total sales doubled in August to $6.9 million from $3.2 million in July. Meanwhile, monthly tax revenue climbed to $1.75 million from around $805,000.

Rising pot sales and the associated tax revenue is good news for supporters of pot legalization who are eager to point out the communal benefits of legal marijuana. It also may influence voters in other states like Alaska and nearby Oregon, where voters will soon decide whether to hop on the recreational marijuana bandwagon.

What’s more, data released for the beginning of September shows sales could grow again this month. During the first eight day of September, the state’s recreational pot stores have had $1.9 million in sales – or on pace for around $7.1 million for the entire month. That would translate into $1.8 million in taxes.

An obvious factor behind the sales growth is the fact that more stores are opening across the state. There were only two-dozen approved retail shops in the when recreational sales kicked off in July, but that number has since grown to more than 50 stores – with more on the way as officials grants additional licenses to some of the thousands of applicants.

It also didn’t hurt that the comparison between the two months was a bit skewed. August’s figures included sales for the entire month while July’s only included three weeks of business.

Another reason for the booming sales is that stores are now less likely to run out of marijuana supplies. Many did so regularly early on but have since mostly cleared up their supply-chain issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencerreported this week that the more than 200 licensed growers have filled the state’s cap of 2 million square feet of legal growing space, allowing production to finally keep up with demand.

Of course, Washington’s sales still pale in comparison to those in Colorado, where there are almost 200 fully-licensed recreational shops in the state, which was the first to allow recreational sales at the start of this year. Colorado Department of Revenue reported this week that it collected $2.97 million in taxes on recreational pot sales (which are taxed at 10% in that state) for the month of July, indicating $29.7 million in sales that month.

As Timereported this week, Colorado’s recreational pot sales have finally surpassed those of the state’s medical marijuana shops, which outnumber the recreational stores by more than 2 to 1.

The fact that more consumers are buying recreational marijuana in Colorado is good news for those who supported the end of cannabis prohibition in that state. As Time pointed out, luring customers from medical dispensaries, not to mention black market dealers, has been an important step toward success for the legalization experiment in Colorado. (That situation in Colorado also offers up a stark contrast to Washington, where the medical marijuana industry is not nearly as developed.)

Meanwhile, as Washington tries to keep up with Colorado in terms of recreational marijuana sales, the state may also eventually lose sales in areas near the Oregon border. The Post-Intelligencer notes that stores in Vancouver, Washington – just across the Colombia River from Portland – have been especially strong, but that could all change if Oregon residents vote on a November ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana sales in that state as well.

Exclusive: An Obama friend poaches a White House aide

The private equity firm run by one of President Obama’s best friends is getting even closer to his administration. The Chicago-based Vistria Group, co-founded last year by longtime Obama pal Marty Nesbitt, has hired Jon Samuels, one of the President’s top lieutenants on Capitol Hill, Fortune has learned.

It’s not immediately clear what role Samuels will fill for the fledgling investment outfit. (In a phone call to Fortune, Samuels confirmed his new employment status, but declined to comment further.) The Chicago native doesn’t appear to have any experience working in the financial services industry. Rather, Samuels has made his career in politics, working his way up from Capitol Hill, where he spent eight years in the office of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Democrat representing Chicago’s lakefront. He joined Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 and eventually went to work for the legislative affairs operation in the White House, which functions as the administration’s in-house lobbying team.

Vistria’s political clout starts at the top: Nesbitt is a charter member of Obama’s Chicago inner circle, serving as national treasurer for both of Obama’s White House bids and now leading the effort to establish his presidential library. Befitting that status, he’s also one of Obama’s favorite golfing buddies, having hit the links with the President 19 times as of early August, according to a Politico breakdown. In business, his defining success so far has been co-founding The Parking Spot, an airport parking company, with now-Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker.

Nesbitt launched the Vistria Group last year with Kip Kirkpatrick, a healthcare investor who once ran for Illinois treasurer. Samuels joins them and a small roster they’ve assembled since then that includes Tony Miller, a Silver Lake veteran who was most recently Obama’s deputy secretary at the Department of Education.

How the firm plans to use that political wattage isn’t yet known. Vistria has raised $148 million for its first fund, according to an Aug. 5 filing, including $5 million from the Illinois Municipal Retirement System. In its brochure, the firm said it plans to invest in primarily U.S.-based mid-market companies, operating in education, health care and financial services—chosen, as Nesbitt told the Chicago Tribune last year, for their position at “the nexus of the public and private sectors.” (The firm’s name is a mash-up of the Latin words for “power” and “three,” which Nesbitt explained points to the cofounders’ financial, operational and regulatory know-how.)

As we’ve noted, there’s a can’t-miss irony to one of the President’s closest confidants and campaign advisors embarking in private equity when Obama won reelection partly by vilifying Mitt Romney’s career in the industry. And it gets richer when that friend poaches talent from the President’s administration. Conceivably, if a broader tax reform debate breaks out next year and the administration presses its case for ending the capital gains treatment of investment managers’ carried interest earnings, the industry and its defenders could make hay by pointing to the Obama alumni club gathering at Vistria.

The firm is hardly the only example of first-order Democratic power cashing in with private equity. After he stepped down last year, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner joined Warburg Pincus as president, amidst speculation his title belied a humbler portfolio as a door-opener for the firm. Al Gore is a partner at Kleiner Perkins. Bill Clinton earned millions in his post presidency advising two investment funds owned by his friend Ron Burkle—and was also on the payroll of Teneo Capital, cofounded by one of his former aides. The list goes on. What appears to distinguish Vistria, however, is the concentration of talent at a new and still-small firm.

Stop freaking out about Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty program

Dear American Liberals: I understand why you really, really don’t like Paul Ryan.

After all, he was the Republican nominee for vice president. He’s an avowed acolyte of Ayn Rand, a progenitor of free market fundamentalism. And though he is often presented as the Republican Party’s most innovative and powerful mind, many of his actual policy proposals—like cutting entitlement spending and taxes on the rich—are really just the same recycled solutions conservatives have been offering for decades.

So, it’s not surprising that parts of the media were geared upto eviscerate Ryan’s latest policy proposal, a plan aimed at reducing poverty in America; a problem that by some measures has shown little improvement since the 1960s, when the federal government first introduced programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Ryan’s proposal aims to combine 11 federal means-tested benefit programs, like the food stamp program and section-8 housing assistance, into a single “opportunity grant” that would be sent to the states and spent in whatever way they see fit. The states would need to include in their plans an individualized roadmap, with measurable benchmarks for success and a signed contract that could lead to incentives or penalties if the aid recipients exceed or fail to meet those goals.

Salon described the plan as an attempt “to treat the poor in as paternalistic and insulting a way as possible.” Annie Lowrey of New York Magazine echoed this notion, accusing Ryan of presupposing “that the poor somehow want to be poor; that they don’t have the skills to plan and achieve and grow their way out of poverty.”

Granted, these assertions represent just one criticism of one part of Ryan’s plan. But the disagreement shows why there is so much hostility between political factions in America today, and why it has become so difficult for conservatives and liberals to compromise.

It should come as no surprise, then, in a country pretty evenly split between these two ideas, that the U.S. government would be gridlocked and unable to do a better job of increasing economic mobility. But that’s why both factions should welcome giving states greater control over how they administer means-tested aid.

If you think that Ryan’s plan is too “paternalistic,” you likely believe that the current welfare system is too paternalistic as it is. After all, the U.S. spends a lot of money on maintaining a massive bureaucracy to make sure poor people spend money only on things the federal government deems necessary. Instead of just giving low-income Americans cash to spend as they see fit, we’ve created the food stamp program and a whole federal agency concerned with providing housing assistance, for example.

If you believe that low-income Americans are poor for reasons that are largely out of their control, why not trust these people with a simple cash payment that can be spent as they see fit? What if a state like New York or California were to try such a plan through a pilot program instituted under a version of the Ryan reform and made it forgiving enough that the cash would only be taken away in the most egregious of cases? If such a program could prove that the liberal vision of poverty actually reflects reality, that would be a huge victory for progressives.

And there’s plenty else in Ryan’s plan for liberals to like. He puts forward ideas for prison sentencing reform that would cut back on mandatory minimums for drug offenders and give judges more leeway in their sentencing, something that has been a progressive policy goal for decades. Ryan also proposes expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit so that younger and childless workers can take advantage of one of the best antipoverty programs the federal government has ever implemented. Sure, he funds this by cutting other means-tested programs (and corporate welfare, like the Department of Agriculture’s Market Access Program). But remember, this is a proposal coming from Paul Ryan, the guy who ran for vice president when the Republican Party was arguing that too few people pay federal income taxes. The Ryan proposal would lessen the tax burden on poor Americans, not increase it.

In other words, this proposal represents a high-profile Republican moving towards the center in an attempt to reform federal programs and make American lives better. Once upon a time, this might have been the catalyst for a piece of legislation in which both Republicans and Democrats ended up giving and getting a little of what they want.

Liberals, you, have spent years bemoaning the fact that Republicans in Congress have been completely unwilling to compromise, and the Ryan proposal is the first sign in a long time that Republican intransigence might be thawing just a bit.

Yes, Paul Ryan does not view the world like you do. But half the country doesn’t see the world like you do either. Both sides should be looking for compromise wherever they can get it.

SEC’s Washington insider trading probe may nab 44 fund firms

The Securities and Exchange Commission has said that as many as 44 fund firms, “including some of the largest hedge funds and asset managers in the world,” may have traded on insider information coming out of the House Ways and Means Committee. If so, that would make the SEC’s congressional insider trading probe one of the largest in history.

The SEC, which normally does not publicly disclose details regarding ongoing investigations, made the admission in a court filing on Wednesday. The news of the filing was first reported by Bloomberg.

The securities regulator went to court in mid-June seeking to enforce subpoenas it issued to Congress. The House Ways and Means committee has argued that it doesn’t need to comply with the subpoenas.

The SEC’s suit was filed in the Southern District of New York. As part of the argument, the SEC said the insider trading probe involved dozens of trading firms, including 25 that were headquartered in New York. It said the remaining 19 were located in a number of states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California. The SEC said only one firm was based in Washington, D.C.

The SEC said that all of the firms received an e-mail from Height Securities that included what may have been insider information about an upcoming healthcare policy change. The information allegedly came from a Congressional staffer and was passed to Height by a lobbyist. The SEC says the potentially illegal trades by the 44 firms may have affected the share prices of four healthcare companies, including Humana HUM, WellCare Health Plans WCG, UnitedHealth Group UNH and Aetna AET. The regulator will need to demonstrate that these firms knowingly traded on inside information, a rather steep legal mountain to climb.

Jamie Dimon: Companies should feel free to bail on the U.S.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he’s okay with companies using a hot tax dodge that could cost the U.S. tens of billions of dollars over the decade.

Dimon’s public thumbs up for inversions—the growing practice where American companies buy smaller foreign companies to relocate overseas and avoid paying U.S. taxes—came in response to a question from Fortune on a media conference call after JPMorgan JPM released its second quarter results. He said the real problem was the tax code, not CEOs trying to shirk their responsibilities.

“You want the choice to be able to go to Wal-Mart to get the lowest prices,” Dimon said on a conference call with reporters on Tuesday morning. “Companies should be able to make that choice as well.”

Dimon did not elaborate on the difference between choosing where to buy your underwear and where a corporations calls home. In a recent cover story for Fortune, Allan Sloan argued that U.S. companies are “positively unpatriotic” when they move their corporate headquarters overseas to pay lower taxes because of the benefits they receive by being (except for tax purposes) American companies. What’s more, Sloan argued undermining the U.S. tax base will be bad for all shareholders in the long run.

Dimon seemed to brush aside those concerns. He said it was inappropriate for anyone to moralize against deals in which U.S. companies seek lower tax rates through mergers. No large U.S. bank has proposed an inversion deal. Since the financial crisis, there has been a debate about the size of the subsidizes that large banks like JPMorgan receive from U.S. taxpayers.

At least for now, inversions are good for Dimon and his shareholders. The firm has been an advisor on 19 inversion deals that have been announced since last year. The bank is advising drug maker AbbVie ABBV on its $53 billion bid for Dublin-based Shire SHPG, which was announced on Monday.

“I love America. I’m just as patriotic as anyone,” said Dimon. “But we have a flawed corporate tax code that is driving U.S. companies overseas.”

Washington rushes to kick off recreational marijuana sales

Long lines and limited supplies could leave many Washington residents without a buzz today, the first day of legal recreational marijuana sales in the state.

The State Liquor Control Board, which regulates marijuana, issued the first wave of business licenses to a small group of retailers early Monday, giving those owners roughly 24 hours to coordinate with growers to stock their shelves before they could open up for customers today.

Washington is just the second state to allow legal sale of marijuana for recreational purposes, following in the footsteps of Colorado. Washington voters approved legalization in January, and since then, state officials have been trying to get organized for today’s kick-off.

A total of 24 business-owners got the state’s approval on Monday after being selected from a pool of more than 300 prospective retailers who won a lottery earlier this year for a chance at the licenses. Officials had set a cap of 334 recreational marijuana stores across the state – unlike Colorado, which has no cap and currently has about 200 licensed stores.

It is not clear how many of the 24 businesses will be ready to operate immediately, but one possible downer for customers at those that do open their doors Tuesday morning is the potential for demand to outpace supply. The state only began doling out licenses for growing recreational marijuana in March and only about 79 growers are currently approved. That small crop of growers hasn’t had enough time to build up a supply large enough to satisfy customers who can buy up to one ounce of recreational marijuana apiece, assuming they are at least 21-years old. As such, some retailers may place restrictions on how much recreational pot each customer can take home.

One of the newly-licensed retailers at Seattle’s only approved weed store, Cannabis City, isn’t even sure his products will make through his first day of business. James Lathrop told theSeattle Times on Monday that he expects to sell all of the 10 pounds of marijuana he’ll be stocking before within hours.

One Washington-approved grower even told Reuters that it could be years before the state’s supply chain can catch up with demand, though lawmakers and others in the market are hopeful that more crops will be ready later this year.

Derek Peterson, CEO of Terra Tech, a publicly-traded agricultural company that invests in the marijuana industry, expects there will be “lines out the door” when Washington’s retail dispensaries open today and that could lead to some people coming away empty-handed. “You will see some semblance of shortages,” he says. “I don’t know how long-lived they’ll be.”

Low supplies should drive up prices, with Reuters reporting recently that customers looking to be part of weed history on Tuesday could pay as much as $30 per gram, which is more than they might expect to pay an illegal dealer or even a loosely regulated medical dispensary.

Colorado became the first state to allow recreational sales in January after both states passed new laws regulating sales of the drug for non-medical reasons in 2012. But, Colorado already had the infrastructure from its larger and more tightly regulated medical marijuana market to expand upon, allowing the state to get its own recreational market off the ground more quickly.

Of course, a few hiccups from the supply chain off the bat are not likely to dampen the enthusiasm of potential investors in the market.

“People just understand, growing pains or not, that it’s a significant industry from a financial and economic standpoint,” Peterson says, adding that any early shortages may even serve as an indicator of high demand for recreational marijuana in the state. What’s more, Colorado dispensaries also experienced shortages when recreational sales became legal in January, but supply was able to catch up to consumer demand.

Fortunereported last week that Colorado’s recreational marijuana industry is riding pretty high six months into its existence, with roughly 10,000 people employed in a market that has already reported almost $70 million in retail sales and $11 million in tax revenues.

Despite Colorado’s head start, though, Peterson thinks Washington could grow to become the larger of the two markets for recreational weed. “I’m looking at the [Colorado] market as a forecast for what Washington may experience over time,” Peterson says.

For one thing, Washington has the larger population of the two states, with almost two million more residents than Colorado. Peterson also notes that Colorado’s recreational marijuana laws allow residents to grow a small amount of pot for their own personal use, whereas Washington residents will need to have their legal marijuana needs satisfied solely by folks like the state-approved retailers opening their doors today.